cleaning the cruft on my system and running revdep-rebuild, has shown broken so-resolution in /usr/lib/vlc/codec/libsdl_image_plugin.so needing libSDL_image-1.2.so.0 now the ebuild does not have dependency on sdl-image, but it builds plugin, which depends on this library. also vlc --list|grep sdl shows vout_sdl Simple DirectMedia Layer video output aout_sdl Simple DirectMedia Layer audio output sdl_image SDL_image video decoder if sdl-image libs were present and vout_sdl Simple DirectMedia Layer video output aout_sdl Simple DirectMedia Layer audio output otherwise. Possible resolution is to add sdl-image to the USE=sdl dependencies.
Fixed with patchlevel 35, I've added a sdl-image useflag & reported upstream (see url). Thanks for reporting.